The Story Behind ~ What About Love

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Apr 182012
 

This is the fifth of 7 blog posts about the songs on my new CD “Big Texas Sky”. As part of this posting, ‘What About Love’ will be available as a FREE download for a limited time.

It’s interesting to try to determine whether a song is sad or uplifting. What is it that makes a piece of poetry happier than another? Unless we’re dealing with Hallmark Cards, there is usually some aspect of a verse that has some underlying bite of mortality to it. Things change and it’s hard to accept. Change and regret, love and release.

I originally thought this song was about divorce when I was singing it as a solo. And, from the point of view of the singer, it sounded to me like the main character wanted out of the marriage.

Was I everything to you? Was I your ‘Rock of Gibraltar? Well it’s time to try something else – stop the newspaper and call the kids. 

But then I had the idea to try it as a duet where these lines are being sung as a statement and a response. Now, when sung as a duet, the lyrics take on a whole different aspect of a waning point in the arc of a relationship.

Well the kids are out of the house. We need to move to a smaller place. Are we OK? Do we still love each other? And the answer is yes, but differently – just breathe… wake up every morning and just breathe…

I wrote this song using an alternate tuning on the guitar called DADGAD where the strings are tuned to those notes instead of the regular EADGBE. The tuning gives the songs a spaciousness and haunting vibe probably because of all the open 4ths and 5ths that occur naturally over the course of the chord progression. The lap steel guitar drenched in reverb also gives the song a loneliness with that far-off wail that often sounds like it’s slipping off a cliff into oblivion.

My duet partner on this recording is Francine Wheeler. I really like how she doesn’t always harmonize above my voice, but is sometimes below it. I also like that her voice is not girl-ish and that it adds a maturity to the duet that supports the lyric content. It’s really a joy to work with someone that gets it. The “it” being how to relay a lyric and a melody/harmony without losing the vibe or the concept because the ego got in the way.

It’s interesting to look at songs or books or paintings that are created at certain times in an artist’s life. I look at this song and think that I would never have written this when I was in my 20’s or even 30’s for that matter. This is a song that comes from years of observation and experience and an acceptance of what love eventually becomes.

Take a listen and let me know what you think. This will be a FREE download until April 25, 2012.

p.s. In my live performances I often refer to a picture I found on the web that clearly illustrates the type of couple that I sing about. I try to describe it , but seeing it for one’s self is best. So I’m going to post it here. This is a photo by  Ian Gonzaga and you can check out his photo blog at www.flickr.com/photos/ianpgonzaga lots of great stuff there!

The Story Behind ~ How Do I Tell Her

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Apr 032012
 

This is the fourth of 7 blog posts about the songs on my new CD “Big Texas Sky”. As part of this posting, ‘How Do I Tell Her’ will be available as a FREE download for a limited time.

‘How Do I Tell Her’ is a song that has a simple premise, but a complicated delivery. The simple message is that a man is afraid to tell his wife he lost his job. The complication comes from trying to relate the emotions involved in such a transaction over the course of an average country song.

Being a music teacher in the public schools, I have been in the position of getting let go because of budget cuts. I have had to go home and have a frank discussion with my wife about the possibility of not having an income. Luckily I’ve always been rehired or have found another teaching position, but the difficulty of coming home to explain the situation is not something a person wants to experience.

The topic is current with unemployment skyrocketing and good honest folk being let go from jobs they thought they were going to retire from. How does a person feel when they go home to tell their spouse? “Like a thief in the night”, “A ghost in their soul”, “Afraid to deliver disappointment”.

You have no idea how the person on the receiving end is going to take it either. Will you collect their tears in kind for all of the bad news you are delivering? or will something else happen? Divorce or support?

The lyrics of this song went through more than a few rewrites. I workshopped it at a songwriter’s circle and got some surprising feedback. They basically said that it sounded like when the song was over the guy was going to put a bullet in his head. Yikes! I wanted a sadness but not too much. So, I rewrote and rewrote. I made the pivot of the story the love that the couple had for each other. “Til death do us part an all that’s supposed to mean”. Of course the wife needs to point it out to the husband (isn’t that usually the case?) and she essentially says get a grip, you’re not a loser and we’ll be OK because we have each other.

Next to “Anywhere But Here”, this is the most ‘country’ sounding track on the album. I wanted to go for that late 60‘s, early 70’s sound with the pedal steel awash in reverb and a male chorus of background singers. Sad, but not too sad. Something that would make a guy order a shot and a beer after having a listen. He’d raise the shot glass and say – “Here’s to that guy… I know how he feels… Man, I wish I had a woman like that…”

Take a listen and let me know what you think. This will be a FREE download until April 10, 2012.

Behind The Song ~ Workin’ Man

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Mar 272012
 

This is the third of 7 blog posts about the songs on my new CD “Big Texas Sky”. As part of this posting, ‘Workin’ Man’ will be available as a FREE download for a limited time.

I had been teaching my middle school music students about the talking blues, a precursor to rap, and I was having them listen to some work songs that had been collected by Alan Lomax for the Smithsonian. I pointed out how the words went along with a rhythm of the work that the singers were doing while they chanted the song. I then assigned them to write their own work song and in order for them to be able to do that I had to model the technique. Oh Mr. Gregory gonna write a rap yo…

I had the kids start out by stomping and clapping a “work beat”and then we found a rhythm that would lay over it so we could fit in the words. Here’s what we came up with as a class:

I’m a workin’ man
I’m chained to the wheel <– I had to explain this to them because I came up with it to get things moving
I’m a workin’ man
They don’t care how I feel
I’m a workin’ man
I’m trying to keep it real
Yeah workin’ man

They got the point and got to work and came up with lots of good lyrics. This is always a fun lesson and we also write blues songs as well. Anyway… The first couple of lines stuck in my head and I wrote them down in my journal and thought nothing of it.

When you perform out live with just you and a guitar and your voice, you try to break things up in the set so that it doesn’t all sound the same. I try some finger style picking, some slide guitar, I use the ukelele, I use a harmonica, etc. I was thinking of trying something acapella in order to break up the consistent use of the guitar and was combing through my notebooks for something to use and remembered the work song lyrics I had written down. I fleshed out the story a bit by making more tongue-in-cheek about a man who works to support his high society girl friend. In the song she’s referred to as ‘Baby’ in the same way that Humphrey Bogart referred to Lauren Bacall.

I work
Cause baby needs a new dress
I work
Cause baby needs a diamond ring
I work
Cause baby needs some red shoes
I work
Baby thinks that I’m a fool

I have performed this for many years by thumping my hand on the body of the guitar and singing acapella. But for the album I decided to arrange it with a heavy bass and junk percussion. The singer’s voice is run through some guitar amp effects and a delay that makes it sound like he’s addressing a union rally. I threw in the slide dobro at the last minute just because I felt it needed that metallic sound of a whining machine and it lends a ‘rawness’ to the whole endeavor.

You can bury me with a shovel in my hand
I’m a working man

Take a listen and let me know what you think. This will be a FREE download until April 3, 2012.

Behind the Song ~ Anywhere But Here

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Mar 192012
 

This is the second of 7 blog posts about the songs on my new CD “Big Texas Sky”. As part of this posting, ‘Anywhere But Here’ will be available as a FREE download for a limited time.

If there is a ‘single’ on this album I guess that the track ‘Anywhere But Here’ would be it. This song stands well on it’s own as a story and as having a world of it’s own yet it also serves as a foundation for the rest of the album. I even plucked the title of the CD from the lyrics when the main character says:

…Oh God please
Help me up off my knees
…Oh God why
Was I born under this big Texas sky

All of this pours a lot of responsibility onto the song and I think it holds up pretty well under the strain.

This is the only track on the CD that you could say was written specifically for this album. The other 6 songs were already written and had been playing them at gigs for a long time.  But as I was trying to decide what this album was going to be about, I knew that a ‘lynch-pin’ type of song was needed. I was thinking that the CD had something to do with Texas or at least the common working class person that one usually associates with Texas, so the song needed to evoke those ideas and pull those emotional strings.

I knew that “that” song wasn’t something I had written already so I figured I’d go back to my notebooks and look for something that would spark an idea. I had been playing with some lyrics in my notebook that were about a girl running away from home because of an abusive father and they caught my eye as I mined my notebook for an idea for this lynch-pin song.

I started to flesh out the verses and I really liked the line about a big Texas sky that comes up in the first verse. I even tried to write it with the sky as the main idea, but it wasn’t working and so I rewrote the lyric from the stand point that this girl is running away, but will never really be able to escape her issues – different book, but same old story. I still clung to the sky image and so I made that line -big Texas sky- come back again in the bridge. In doing so, the phrase takes on a bigger meaning rather than just a casual observance of her surroundings as in the first verse.

After I wrote those lines and sat back to figure out what I wrote, I realized that the image of a big sky overhead made me think of God. At least God as the omnipresence, the spirit that is always there, watching as we live our lives. We either acknowledge it or not, but the fact remains that it is there. And for this girl it becomes a kind of metaphor for that aphorism that states: Anywhere you go, there you are…

No matter what the issue, the world keep spinning and the sun and moon and stars still spin over head and you’re still running or stopping to face the music. I guess that once a person realizes this and becomes aware of it, our problems seems a little less daunting. There are bigger things than our tiny lot here on this speck of dust. Ah well…

A quick note about revision. I had the song all written, orchestrated and recorded with a nice vocal take that I was happy with except…

Ahh that ‘except’. A friend of mine always says to me that if I notice something’s wrong you can be sure that someone else will, so fix it! There was a word that was bugging me and it was in the first verse.

This was the original:

She’s gonna run far
From this broke down life
Her Daddy’s greasy hands
And his visits in the night
He ain’t gonna hold her down this time
She ain’t lookin’ back this time

This is the revision:

She’s gonna run far
From this broke down life
Step Daddy’s greasy hands
And his visits in the night
He ain’t gonna hold her down this time
She ain’t lookin’ back this time

The fact that she was being abused (and the lyrics imply sexual abuse) by her own father really bugged me. But if it was her step daddy that didn’t bug me as much. It nagged at me until I fixed it and re-recorded it. It’s still an icky image, but it works a little better for me than the original. A songwriter shouldn’t be afraid to rewrite even if it is during the process of recording.

Take a listen and let me know what you think. This song will be a FREE download until March 27th!

The Story Behind ~ Aunt Jean’s Piano

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Mar 132012
 

This is the first of 7 blog posts about the songs on my new CD “Big Texas Sky”. As part of this posting, Aunt Jean’s Piano will be available as a FREE download fo a limited time.

Aunt Jean’s Piano

I don’t know where the germ for this song actually came from but it is based on a true person and a true event. I probably got the idea planted in my brain from a casual conversation I was having about my father’s side of the family. He was the third child of 9 raised on a wheat and cattle farm in East Texas. The 8th child, Jean, was the creative, fanciful child. She was the one who sang beautifully and played the piano. She sewed and was an artist of some accomplishment. But in 1948 she collapsed and died from a brain aneurism at the age of 19. (In the lyrics she dies at age 24, but I needed a rhyme with door. Literary license.)

So the story of the lyrics start with the narrator touching a piano that had not been played in ages and we find out that he is in fact playing the piano that his Aunt Jean had played so many years ago. There is a connection to be made across time just by the fact that he is playing the same piano that his Aunt Jean had played. It’s like walking through a sacred place where saints had once wandered and prayed. There’s a magic to the touch of the keys and the sounds that come from the instrument because of who had played it and the circumstances of their untimely passing.

In recording this song I knew that I wanted to keep it simple. The guitar part already fills out a lot of the orchestration because of the finger style picking, so whatever instruments join in on this song will have to do so sparingly. I chose to go with a fiddle and a mandolin to add dabs of sound and fill where needed. I was so lucky to have Jim Allyn come in and play both instruments. Jim has a great ear and knows where to put the notes so they don’t step on the vocal lines. When you listen to the song, keep that in mind and not how the mandolin and fiddle play around the edges.

So where is the piano? The whole song is about a piano, but there’s no piano in the song as it stood. I really didn’t want to write in a piano part or a piano break; that would be way too obvious. At the last minute, after I had all of the previously mentioned parts recorded and mixed, I came up with an idea. In the lyrics there is a mention that Jean’s Pa liked the “Old Methodist hymns…”. So I thought why not start the song with a hymn being sung by Jean and the narrator. I found a Methodist hymnal online and chose one that I thought would fit the mood of the song that was to follow? I played the piano part  and I called in my friend Michel to sing the melody. The part was up in her range, but it turned out to be a flavor for the song because it intoned an untrained girl singing while at the same time she played the piano part. I harmonized by singing the alto part down an octave and then added a little spoken tag: Thank you Jean…

Take a listen and let me know what you think. This will be a free download until March 19, 2012.

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